Synology released a stable version of Virtual Machine Manager extension for DSM OS, which runs on the Synology NAS boxes. This extension uses KVM/QEMU and allows execution of VMs on the Synology boxes.

Obviously you can install VMs each time using an iso image and installer. However, if you would like to use this feature for some Linux playgrounds (or maybe you want to deploy many VMs?) you would probably like to create a prepared VM template and create new VMs using this template. This blog post covers exactly this case: creation of CentOS template, which can be used for fast and easy deployment of further VMs on the Synology. Image templates with Ubuntu or other Linux distributions can be prepared on the similar way.

In my old blog with octopress I used the tag cloud plugin with logarithmic distribution for calculation of tag sizes.
The rendered tag cloud was pretty nice from the optic side. All existing approaches I saw for hugo(1, 2) were not so nice, the main reason is the usage of logarithmic distribution in the calculation of tag size.

GitHub Pages are quite popular for hosting static sites built by site generators.
However, GitHub Pages have some limitations:

no SSL/TLS for custom domains

proper support of Jekyll sites only

One possible alternative is to use GitLab Pages, which does not have this limitations.
Another possible alternative is to use Travis CI and deploy the site to some shared www hosting. Hetzner offers some good plans, they also include a free-of-charge SSL certificate.

This blogpost describes how to deploy a static site hosted on GitHub, built with Hugo and Travis CI and deployed via FTPS to Hetzner www space.

Test Kitchen is a common tool for integration testing of Chef cookbooks. Usually a combination of Vagrant&VirtualBox is used to bring up the VMs. This works well for local development setups, but what about Continuous Integration environments? You can find several approaches how cookbooks can be tested in the CI:

Maybe you are also playing aroung with IPv6 and want to setup IPv6 only network and asking yourself how to reach the IPv4 Internet?
Right, with DNS64 and NAT64. This blog post gives an overview about a such setup on CentOS/RHEL 7 with bind and tayga.

Chef has different execution phases. Especially the compile and converge phase are important when writing cookbooks: the resources are collected in the compile phase and are executed in the converge phase.

In some special cases you might want to have dynamic resources, which are created and executed in the converge phase. The main background is that you want to react on something you known in the execution phase only.

Given a situation where you want to cleanup configuration files, which get installed by some package during a chef run (real examples might be apache on debian or freeradius on RHEL). You can try to solve this situation like this:

Chef Development Kit contains a chef-dk gem with chef executable.
chef generate is a pretty usefull command for generation of skelettons.
Per default the information like author, license or email looks like this: